Key Benefits

• Improved sales methodology and results; gained huge time savings, enabling more sales in less time
• High value CRM solution, fully customisable to the company specific needs and requirements
• Effective communications between departments, helping with improving working processes between the sales and customer service teams
• Increased overall productivity and improved collaboration with remote salesforce

Active Voice EMEA is a subsidiary of NEC Unified Solutions and a global provider of unified messaging, computer telephony, and voice messaging solutions. By choosing a CRM solution from Maximizer, the company has grown its business and enabled a pro-active approach to relationship management with bolstered communications between its departments.

Growth Opportunity
Active Voice EMEA is a Seattle-based company with offices in the Netherlands, United States and Australia. With over 200,000 Active Voice systems installed in more than sixty countries, Active Voice is powering the communications infrastructure of businesses worldwide.

Active Voice’s products are sold and supported through a network of independent telecommunications manufacturers, dealers, computer resellers, and strategic partners.

Although working closely with such a vast network all over the world, Active Voice did not have a dedicated sales automation solution and effective customer service tools in place and was reliant on a in-house solution based on Lotus Notes. Sales consultants did not have the correct tools in place to pro-actively follow up on leads. The custom developed customer service software in use by the company was not sufficient and Active Voice began to explore the possibility of a dedicated CRM solution that could be customised to its needs.

Suitable CRM
Active Voice BV’s Walter van Schaik says that Maximizer’s CRM offering made the most sense. “We had been looking at Microsoft Dynamics CRM as well,” he explains. “But the decision to go with Maximizer was made on the positive feeling we had for the company to be able to deliver the results we were looking for and the competitive price and value compared to Microsoft’s application.”

Van Schaik also adds that Maximizer could also be customised to meet all of Active Voice’s needs, another important component of the decision made. Martijn Rijnders of Systony, the implementation partner for Maximizer in the Netherlands, reinforce that and stated that Active Voice would require specialised portals from the solution, for customers and partners, amongst others. Workflow automation was used for that purpose and was provided via the KnowledgeSync module that is included with Maximizer Enterprise. “Systony implemented and customised the powerful e-CRM module for Maximizer Enterprise, as part of the whole process to guarantee every single requirement and need of Active Voice will be fulfilled.

“Active Voice chose the Maximizer Enterprise CRM suite, based on a Microsoft SQL server back-end,” says van Schaik. “The e-CRM suite is used to provide our roaming sales and service staff with web access to customised portals. This enables our end-users to access a powerful knowledgebase, even while out on the road.”

“The initial phase of the CRM project was to implement Maximizer for the sales department. This was the first and also the most challenging step,” explains van Schaik. “The sales department wasn’t used to benefit from sales automation tools previously and we first had to work on internal ‘re-education’ of the team’s working habits first. In the beginning it was hard to get the users to start using Maximizer, mainly because it was new and the system didn’t contain valuable data yet.” It was quite obvious however, that it was largely due to the lack of an effective CRM solution before.

The implementation of Maximizer for the customer service department was much easier, continue van Schaik, mainly because they were already used to using automation tools for their daily work and secondly because they could access data already inputted by the sales department and immediately derive value from it.”

“Active Voice also makes use of integration from our financial software into Maximizer,” he adds. “So our sales people can view customer turnover, open invoice information and other valuable data. This integration is made possible with a software tool called ‘NTI’ developed by Systony- Maximizer certified Business Partner. This tool allows for the integration of any open database system into Maximizer CRM.” The implementation was completed in a couple of weeks and van Schaik says that this was a great testament that Maximizer CRM can be rapidly deployed, as Active Voice were hoping; another benefit and reason for choosing Maximizer CRM over other competitors’ solutions.”

Clear Value
Active Voice started deriving value from its new Maximizer CRM solution very early on. Van Schaik says that the solution is saving time and allowing for proactive and effective customer relationship management process to take place within the organisation.

“It has improved collaboration between the different departments, specifically sales and support and has helped us to grow our business because of the more proactive approach Maximizer can deliver to our sales people,” he explains.

“Maximizer is saving us a lot of time too,” he continues. “And it lets us sell more in less time. I totally believe that the smart investment we did in Maximizer CRM solution will deliver full ROI within the first six months.”